AI and news

The media are actively competing for users’ attention while trying to maintain public trust and generate financial returns. The use of artificial intelligence in newsrooms around the world is steadily increasing. AI helps to capture information, create news stories, and spot trends. For almost 10 years now, AI-driven journalism has been infiltrating the media and producing various news stories on sports, finance, weather, and transport.

The program to analyze financial reports and write articles based on them was first launched by Bloomberg. The news produced included all the necessary numerical data and facts. AI was also used in the Washington Post’s coverage of the 2016 Olympics.

The Associated Press newswire has already increased its articles on corporate earnings by more than 10 times — and this was only made possible by artificial intelligence technology. The benefits of AI in globalization and automation are simply invaluable: it frees employees (journalists) from routine tasks and directs their energies towards more complex tasks, where creativity is important. Artificial intelligence helps to create more and better content to serve the audience.

Also in today’s news field, so-called ‘robo-reporting’ is being used. This AI technology can create multiple versions of news stories based on a single news item — for example, to serve different media or different consumers. This approach also allows coverage of a specific niche — an audience that is interested in specific data by region or area.

In the German media, CrimeMap, an AI-powered project that has been trained to analyze police bulletins, sort the information it receives, and recognize the data it receives, has made a real splash.

In newsrooms, AI systems are becoming indefatigable colleagues who can alert on the latest news, track viral stories, and monitor current trends. They sift through vast amounts of data, analyzing everything.